The Wealth of Nations

The Wealth of Nations (full eng title: . An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ) is released on March 9, 1776 magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It was created as a counterpoint to the hitherto prevailing mercantilist economic policy as practiced by the then European powers. Smith's work is regarded as the fundamental work of economics, which established itself as an independent scientific discipline only in the following period, and marks both the beginning of classical political economy as well as parallel of economic liberalism.

Smith does not develop its own complete theory in his work. The Wealth of Nations is to be understood in large part as a summary of the economic theoretical findings of numerous liberal thinkers. It experienced a great response by subsequent economists such as David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus and Karl Marx. Today, the plant primarily through the metaphor of the invisible hand ( and thus the alleged principle) is known, although this was actually mentioned only in passing by Smith.

Content

The Wealth of Nations is divided into five books:

The plant treats such as the basic mechanisms of action of the various markets, the cash economy, the factors of production and foreign trade.

In this work, Smith deals especially with the division of labor in emerging factories and bases his theories on the example of pin production in southern England.

Translation

The first transfer in the German language got the Göttingen historian and economist Georg Friedrich Sartorius (1765-1828), of a brief statement of Smith's teachings, entitled "Manual of Political Economy " (Berlin: Unger, 1796) brought out and also to the distribution of this work had merit. Later, other translations appeared, inter alia, by Christian Garve (1742-1798) and Max Stirner ( 1806-1856 ). A modern version is the translation was published in 2009 by Franz Stöpel.